The Poet (37 page)

Drive carefully!

I read the fax twice and each time it gave me the same chill. I knew what they meant now. About the moon. The letter was the voice of a man from someplace else. Not here. Not this planet.

“Everybody in agreement on authenticity?” Backus asked.

“There are several authenticators,” Rachel said. “The pinprick. The quote from Poe. What about the reference to Best Pal? Has Florida been informed about this?”

“Yes. The Best Pals angle obviously becomes the priority. They’re dropping everything else for the time being.”

“What does Brass say?”

“That it obviously confirms the linkage theory. There are references here to both strings, the detectives and the others. She and Brad were right. One offender. She’s now going with the Florida killings as our model. Everything that follows is just a repetition of the initial crime sequence. He’s repeating the ritual.”

“In other words, find out why he killed Beltran and you know why he killed the rest.”

“Right. Brass and Brad have been talking to Florida all morning. Hopefully, it won’t take long to get some answers and put the model together.”

Everybody seemed to brood over this for a few moments.

“We’re going to stay here?” Rachel asked.

“I think it’s best,” Backus said. “The answers may be in Florida but it’s static. History. We’re still closest to him here.”

“It says he’s already chosen his next intended,” I said. “Is that the next cop, you think?”

“That’s exactly what I think,” Backus said somberly. “So we’ve run out of time. As we sit here talking, he is watching another man, another cop, somewhere. And if we don’t find out where that is, we’re going to have another dead man on our hands.”

He pounded a fist on the table.

“We’ve got to make a break, people, we’ve got to do something. We have to find that man before it is too late!”

He said it with force and conviction. He was marshaling his troops. He had asked for their best work before. He needed it to be even better now.

“Bob,” Rachel said. “The fax makes reference to Orsulak’s funeral being today. When did this come in and where did it go to?”

“Gordon has that.”

Thorson cleared his throat and spoke without looking at Rachel or me.

“It came to a fax line at Quantico that is assigned to academy business,” Thorson said. “Needless to say, its sender used a masking option on the sender ID. Nothing there. It arrived at three thirty-eight this morning. That’s eastern time. I had Hazelton chase down the sequence. A fax call came into the general Quantico number, the operator recognized the fax beep and switched the call to the wire room. She couldn’t tell where or who it was going to because all she had was the beep. So she took a guess and switched it to an academy fax and it was there in the basket until this morning when it was finally noticed and brought down to the center.”

“We’re lucky it’s not still sitting there unnoticed,” Backus added.

“Right,” Thorson said. “Anyway, Hazelton took the original to the lab and came up with something. Their take is that it wasn’t a fax-to-fax transmission. It came from an inboard fax.”

“A computer,” I said.

“With a fax modem. And since we know this guy is a traveler, it’s not likely that he’s lugging around an Apple Mac on his back. The speculation is he has a laptop computer with a fax modem. Most likely a cellular modem. It would give him the most freedom.”

Everyone digested this for a few moments. I wasn’t sure of its significance. It seemed to me that a lot of the information they had amassed during the investigation was useless until they had a suspect in custody. Then it might be used to build a case against him for trial. But until then, it wasn’t much help in catching him.

“All right, so he has state-of-the-art computer equipment,” Rachel finally said. “What do we have in place for the next fax?”

“We’ll be standing by to trace any fax calls to the general line,” Thorson said. “At best we’ll get the originating cell. No closer.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

Thorson seemed reluctant to answer any question from me. Rachel stepped in when he didn’t.

“It means if he’s on a cellular we can’t make a trace to a direct number or location. We’ll get the city and the originating cell where the call came from. Probably at best that will knock it down to a search area of more than a hundred thousand people.”

“But we’ll have the city,” Backus said. “We’ll be able to go to the locals and look for cases that may serve as bait cases. It would only have to be a homicide committed in the last week. Just since Orsulak.”

He looked at Thorson.

“Gordon, I want another flag sent to all FOs. Tell them to check with the locals on any recent homicides. We’re talking about all the whodunits in general, but child cases in particular and anything with unusual MO or violent assault on the corpse, before or after death. Get that out by this afternoon. Request acknowledgment from SACs by eighteen hundred tomorrow. I don’t want it to fall through the cracks.”

“Got it.”

“Also, FYI, Brass suggested one other thing as well,” Backus added. “And that’s that the bit in the fax about his next target being selected could be a bluff. A design to make us react and scramble while the offender is actually slipping away, going under. Remember, it was the chief fear that we had about publicity.”

“I disagree,” Rachel said. “Reading this, I see a braggart, someone who thinks he’s better than us and wants to toy with us. I take him at his word. There’s a cop out there somewhere and he’s in the sights.”

“I tend to think that way, too,” Backus said. “I think Brass does as well but felt the need to put the other possibility on the table.”

“So, then, what’s our strategy now?”

“Simple,” Backus said. “We find this guy and arrest him before he hurts anybody else.”

Backus smiled and everyone but Thorson followed suit.

“Actually, I think that until something else breaks, we stay put and redouble our efforts here. And let’s keep this fax to ourselves. Meantime, we’re ready to move if something develops. We hope for another fax from our guy and Brass is working up another alert for the field offices. I’ll tell her to stress its importance to the FOs in the Pacific time zone.”

He scanned the room and nodded. He was finished.

“Need I say it again?” he asked. “Your best work. We really need it now more than ever.”

30

The meeting with the locals didn’t get under way until almost eleven. It was short and sweet. It was the kind of situation where the suitor asks the bride-to-be’s father for approval of the marriage. Most of the time it doesn’t really matter what the old man says. It’s going to happen. In carefully chosen, friendly words Backus told the locals that the Big G was in town and was now running the show. There was a little bit of posturing and disagreement on some particulars but they rolled over with the empty promises Backus made.

During this meeting, I continued to avoid eye contact with Thorson. While driving over from the federal building Rachel had explained to me the reason for the morning’s tensions between her and Thorson. The night before she had run into her former husband in the hotel hallway while leaving my room. Her disheveled appearance probably told him all he needed to know. I groaned when I heard, thinking about how it complicated things. She seemed to be unconcerned and viewed the situation as amusing.

At the end of the meeting with the locals, Backus divided assignments. Rachel and Thompson were given the Orsulak crime scene. I was to ride with them. Mize and Matuzak were to start backtracking on the interviews the locals had conducted of Orsulak’s friends and try to reconstruct the dead detective’s movements on his last day. Thorson and Carter were given the Little Joaquin case and assigned to re-cover the ground trod by the locals. Grayson would act as liaison to the Phoenix cops, and Backus, of course, would run the show from the field office, maintaining contact on other developments in the case in Quantico and the other cities.

Orsulak had lived in a small yellow ranch house with stucco walls in South Phoenix. It was a marginal neighborhood. I counted three junk cars parked on gravel lawns and two Sunday morning garage sales in full swing on the block.

Rachel used the key she had gotten from Grayson to cut through an evidence sticker spread across the front doorjamb and then unlocked the door. Before pushing it open she turned to me.

“Remember, they didn’t find him for three and a half days. Are you up to this?”

“Course.”

For some reason I was embarrassed that she had asked me this in front of Thompson, who smiled as if I were a rookie. That annoyed me, too, even though in actuality I was less than a rookie.

We were three steps in before the odor engulfed me. As a reporter I had seen plenty of bodies, but I’d never had the pleasure of entering a closed structure where a body had rotted for three days before discovery. The putrid odor was almost palpable. It was like the ghost of William Orsulak, haunting the place and all who dared enter. Rachel left the front door open to help air the place out some.

“What are you looking for?” I asked once I was reasonably assured that I had control of my throat.

“Inside, I don’t know,” Rachel replied. “It’s already been gone over by the locals, his friends …”

She went to the dining room table in the room to the right of the door and put down and opened a file she had been carrying. She began leafing through the pages. It was part of the package the local cops had turned over to the agents.

“Have a look around,” she said. “It looks like they were pretty thorough, but you might come up with something. Just don’t touch anything.”

“Right.”

I left her there and started slowly to look about. My eyes first caught on the easy chair in the living room. It was a dark green but the headrest was stained darker with blood. It had flowed down the back into the seat of the chair. Orsulak’s blood.

On the floor in front of the chair and near the wall behind it, chalk circles outlined two holes where bullets had been retrieved. Thompson knelt here and opened his toolbox. He began probing the bullet holes with a thin steel pick. I left him there and walked further into the house.

There were two bedrooms, Orsulak’s and an extra that seemed dusty and unused. There were photos of two teenaged boys on the bureau in the bedroom the detective had used, but I guessed his kids never used the other, they never came to visit. I moved slowly through these rooms and the hallway bathroom but I saw nothing that I thought mattered to the investigation. I secretly hoped I would come upon something that would help and that would impress Rachel, but I came up empty.

When I stepped back into the living room I saw neither Rachel nor Thompson.

“Rachel?”

No answer.

I walked through the dining room to the kitchen but it was empty. I went through the laundry room, opened a door and glanced into the dark garage but saw no one there either. Coming back into the kitchen I saw the door ajar and glanced through the window over the sink. I saw movement in the tall brush at the rear of the backyard. Rachel was walking, with her head down, through the brush, Thompson behind her.

The yard was cleared for maybe twenty yards going back. A seven-foot-high plank fence ran down both sides. But at the back there was no fence line and the dirt yard dropped down into a dry creek bed where there was a lot of brush. Rachel and Thompson were on a trail moving through the brush away from the house.

“Thanks for waiting,” I said when I caught up. “What are you doing?”

“What do you think, Jack?” Rachel said. “Did the Poet just park in the driveway, knock on the door and pop Orsulak after being invited in?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.”

“I do, too. No, he watched him. Maybe for days. But the locals canvassed the neighborhood and no neighbor saw a car that didn’t belong. Nobody saw anything out of the routine.”

“So you think he came in through here?”

“It’s a possibility.”

She studied the ground as we walked. She was looking for anything. A footprint in the mud, a broken twig. She stopped a few times to bend and look at pieces of debris alongside the trail. A cigarette box, an empty soft drink bottle. She didn’t touch any of it. It could be collected later if necessary.

The trail took us under a stanchion holding up high-tension power lines and into a stand of heavy brush at the back end of a trailer park. We reached a high point and looked down into the park. It was not well kept and many of the units had crudely fashioned add-ons like porches and toolsheds. On some of the units the porches had been enclosed with plastic sheeting and were being used as additional bedrooms and living spaces. An aura of crowded poverty emanated from the thirty or so dwellings jammed together on the lot like toothpicks in a box.

“Well, shall we?” Rachel asked, as if we were going for high tea.

“Ladies first,” Thompson said.

Several of the inhabitants of the park were sitting on door stoops and old couches set in front of their units. They were mostly Latinos and a few blacks. Maybe some Indians. They watched us emerge from the brush with no real interest, which showed they recognized us as cops. We showed the same lack of interest in them as we started walking along the narrow lane between rows of trailers.